


Countdown

by superfundsite (orphan_account)



Category: Red Dwarf (UK TV)
Genre: Character Death, Episode S06E06: Out of Time, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-04
Updated: 2020-04-04
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:14:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23476021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/superfundsite
Summary: I wanna see your face, I wanna see you now.
Relationships: Dave Lister/Arnold Rimmer
Comments: 2
Kudos: 22





	Countdown

**Author's Note:**

> Set during the end of S06E06, the scene where Rimmer is running through Starbug to destroy the time drive. I haven't started S7, so I have no clue what really happened after that, but i want to write a sequel to this, maybe. Wrote this all in one go, it probably shows. Title and summary taken from the song Countdown, by Pulp.

Ah.

It clicks in his mind that he has to do something. Rimmer’s simulated heart is pounding furiously, his hearing’s gone fuzzy and it’s a miracle he manages to stay on his feet when he manages to push himself away from the console he’s hunched over. He looks around himself dazedly. 

The Cat, gone. Kryten, too.

And Lister-

He doesn’t get why he’s suddenly so affected by it. After all, he had just seen Cat and Kryten fall in quick succession, Lister being the first one to go. It was just so… sudden, that was all. Yes, that was the only reason he feels like this. Like his parents would scold him, “no use crying over spilled milk”.

Well, certainly not milk he was crying over now, was he?

He hated Lister, hated his slobbish ways, hated his optimism, hated him but now that he was gone, it felt like someone had extinguished something in him. He’d always joked about Lister dying, Lister getting offed, one way or another. How many times had he fantasized about something like this happening? Now that it has, he wishes- he wishes he’d done something different. Said something different. Acted differently if it was all going to go belly-up so fast. 

Not even a chance to tell Lister-

Rimmer stops his train of thought. He feels something funny tickle in the back of his throat. 

The feeling doesn’t leave as he grabs the bazookoid from the munitions cabinet, just grows. He tries not to look as he rushes back out of the cockpit. His head is spinning, spinning so fast it may as well fly off his shoulders and leave his body to fend for itself, because he has barely an idea forming in his head as to what to do next. 

They were here for the time drive, so something had to be done about that. Rimmer almost stumbles over his feet as he runs down the corridors of Starbug. The tickle in the back of his throat seems to be spreading upwards, to his sinuses. He sniffs, and as he trips over a cable in the rapidly collapsing ship he opens his mouth to let out a small cry of alarm, but instead a small choked sob leaves him. 

He’s so stupid. God, he’s so stupid, so stupid.

He can’t stop to mourn, not now, not ever. Does he mourn Lister? He doesn’t know how he’s supposed to feel about this. Arnold Judas Rimmer and his inability to compartmentalize emotions, to operate on something other than neuroses and anger and the feeling of never being good enough, not good enough to help Lister, not good enough to stop any of this from happening.

It’s not like it’s his fault, realistically. Lister was the one who took that forbidden peek into their future, never trying to be a hero, but always seeming to come out to something close to it. That attitude infuriated him sometimes, how could Lister always seem to come out on top when Rimmer always fell short? If it wasn’t in one department, it was in another, and it left Rimmer feeling so… conflicted.

He can’t blame anyone for this happening. Themselves, in some twisted way. Himself, in some way. 

He always blames himself, doesn’t he? Trying to blame everyone else, even if he seems to have made up some winning argument, some way to justify his actions, something to make his guilt lessen, it circles back to him, because he certainly is the cause of so many of their problems.

The deaths of one thousand, one hundred and sixty-eight people including himself, Lister waking up three million years after he was supposed to have woken up, the Cat’s existence, everything chalks up to his own incompetence, and this is no exception.

By Io, you’d think he’d have gotten over this, but he’s still the same self-loathing, cowardly worm that everyone describes him as after they first meet him, the one constant in his life.

Maybe- maybe Lister didn’t think of him like that. It’s a silly notion to entertain, putting words in the mouth of a dead man, but it offers him some comfort momentarily.

Just as quick as the comfort comes, it goes, and leaves him feeling so empty and vacuous and hollow. He’s feeling sick. His nose feels runny, and Rimmer feels simulated tears wet his cheeks. 

Holograms could cry, he supposes. He laughs bitterly, thick and in the back of his throat. The tears seem to almost fizzle out as they come, like seltzer tablets in water. Fizzy and temporary, pull yourself together, just a bit more and it’s time to get down to business. 

Rimmer blinks away the sensation, at the least, feeling like a mess. He doesn’t even know how his feet carried him from the cockpit down to the engine room, but he’s grateful. He points the bazookoid at the time drive, and stares at the shower of sparks as he fires at it.

Brilliant, white and blue as it short circuits and pops and bursts with energy, as the ruptures spread through the system and Everything explodes around him. For a moment, he feels the weightlessness of zero G, as the life support fails and he’s essentially free falling amongst tons and tons of steel and electrical fire in the middle of deep space. 

Holograms don’t need to breathe, don’t need what living humans need to survive. They need a battery, a power source. Even he himself was beyond what most holograms had, in the form of a near indestructible hard light drive, and he feels the flames sear and lick at his simulated body. He doesn’t burn, though he feels the strange combination of white hot flame and the cold vacuum of space.

He floats, momentarily, dazed from the loudness of the initial explosion, and his lightbee flickers as the massive shockwave hits him. Even then, he stares out at the stars, and sighs. No sound, but he feels simulated breath leave his simulated lungs.

He thinks about “just what kind of scrape have you gotten yourself into, Arnold”, and about Lister, and his limp body, always so full of life and its most rough and tumble aspects, how strange it looked laying there in the pilot’s chair.

Rimmer lets out a breathy noise, whimpering and small, before his lightbee flickers once, twice, and then he blinks out of view.


End file.
